How to fix the blue tint on YouTube videos problem (Flash and Nvidia)

If you have upgraded to the latest flash plugin 11.2.202.228 you might have noticed that in YouTube videos there is a blue tint. This affects only Nvidia users who are using hardware acceleration through VDPAU. I am using the latest libvdpau 0.4.1. Although there are many bugs commited to Adobe about it, it isn’t fixed and is marked as cannot reproduce! Anyway if you are seeing a video with blue people here is how to temporary fix it.

Open YouTube and start playing a video. Right click on it and select Settings. There in the first tab untick Enable Hardware Acceleration. Reload the page and the problem should be gone for now.

Reload the page and the problem should be gone for now.

If you are unable to press the button open another browser and try again. A friend of mine couldn’t press the button in Chrome under Ubuntu but pressed it by using Opera.

You can also manually edit /etc/adobe/mms.cfg as root

Shell

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sudo vi/etc/adobe/mms.cfg

and set

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EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

OverrideGPUValidation=true

Of course the whole proccess has the side effect that your CPU will be used more to decode flash videos…

Unfortunatelly this flash plugin version is the last version, according to Adobe, that will be the last flash player released for Linux. Upcoming releases will be bundled with Google Chrome using its Pepper API…

Maybe it’s time to give HTML5 a try. To enable HTML5 video playback simply Join the HTML5 Trial. Of course you can also downgrade your flash player plugin to the previous working version. You choose.